Dr. Nikolai Puntikov Chairman of the Board RUSSOFT

Wikipedia defines Crowdsourcing as "the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to a large group of people or community (a crowd), through an open call". Tim Ringo, head of IBM Human Capital Management, has been recently quoted saying "I think crowd sourcing is really important, where you would have a core set of employees but the vast majority are sub-contracted out".

Despite advocates of crowdsourcing quote many success stories (Amazon Mechanical Turk, Freelancer.com, Innovation Exchange, Smartsheet, Wikipedia), other experts criticize the underlying business model as controversial from the economical and social perspectives.

At this roundtable, panelists will debate feasibility of the Crowdsourcing in the field of industrial software engineering:

• Why crowdsourcing is different from traditional outsourcing?
• In which domains of professional software development can crowdsourcing potentially work? Software product development? Custom application development? Web applications? SaaS? Scientific research?
• How can a large-scale software project be managed when there are no written contracts or employee agreements? How to protect confidentiality and trade secrets?
• How can one expect high-quality work from participants having low monetary motivation and no personal interest in the project?
• Will this really save cost of development? Or will the added cost to implement the project eat all savings?
• How to maintain the working relations between project stakeholders and crowdsourced-workers and between co-workers?
• Who is more likely to "give it a try" – large IT corporations, innovative product companies, professional outsourcing vendors? Will it ever be used by end-users?

Those and other questions will be discussed by professionals and analysts representing different sectors of the industry.

Biography

Coinciding with Russia’s dramatic move toward privatization in 1991, Nikolai Puntikov founded StarSoft, one of Russia’s seminal private software engineering firms. During the next 15 years as CEO of StarSoft, he developed the company into a premier outsourcing software services provider catering to clients in Europe and North America.

In 2007, StarSoft merged with Exigen Services to become a leading force in the IT outsourcing space in Central and Eastern Europe. Nikolai worked for Exigen Services as President Delivery until July 2010. In his position at Exigen Services he was responsible for business development, managing customer relationships, and operations in Eastern Europe, Baltics and China.

Puntikov is an outspoken advocate of both the domestic and international portions of the Russian IT services industry. Since 2003, he has served on the Board of the Russian National Association of Software Developers (RUSSOFT), and was elected Chairman of the Board in 2007-2008 and since June 2010 until now.

Puntikov resides in St. Petersburg, Russia and holds a Master of Science degree from the St. Petersburg State University and a Doctorate degree from the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Alexander Orlov

consultant, coach

Abstract

How do people become managers in our IT companies? They usually come from engineers. To make this transition successful it must be done internally – from one type of thinking to the different one, from one role to the other. Various research articles say it may take from 6 months up to 2 years to complete the transition. According to the author’s experience some managers have stuck in the process.
In addition, this transition from engineer’s thinking to manager’s one depends on the type of the company the people work for. Different companies and different org structures requires different managerial and communication skillset, as well as different balance of those skills.

In his speech author bases on 6-years experience as a manager in large IT companies, as well as on educational experience when more than 1000 managers from best IT companies of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova took part. The report will highlight main obstacles in personal transition to IT management and how company type impacts this transition.

BIO

Alexander Orlov. Consultant, coach.
Founder of Happy PM Club (www.happy-pm.com) – entertaining and educational project for managers in IT companies. Author of the book "Secrets of Managing Software Engineers". (All in Russian.)

Speaker at the conferences:

• PM Days 2008
• Agile Summer 2008
• SQA Days 4
• Weborub 2008
• SQA Days 5
• Software Engineering Forum 2009
• Software People 2009
• PM Labs 2009
• PHP Conf 2009
• CEE-SECR 2009
• Training Labs 2010
• Software People 2010
• SQA Days 7
• Software Engineering Forum 2010
• Dev Conf 2010
• Dev Point 2010
• Agile Base Camp 2010 (Kiev)

Professional Experience

2007 – 2010
Happy-PM.com, founder, consultant.

2004 – 2008
Intel, engineer manager, led the teams in the project:

• Intel SOA Expressway – software for fast integration of Web-services and high-performance XML processing.
• Apache Harmony – independent open-source implementation of Java 5.

2000 – 2004
Sun Microsystems, Inc. – work per contract, leading the department of testing Java on mobile devices:

• J2ME CLDC – Java on cellular phones
• Java Card – Java on smart cards
• Java Device Test Suite – development of commercial test suite that checks Java on cellular phones

Thomas Erl

SOA adoption continues to rise in the financial sector, with banks worldwide not only investing in individual SOA initiatives, but also collaborating to establish new industry standards and architecture specifications specific to SOA implementation in the banking community. In this session, best-selling SOA author Thomas Erl discusses SOA initiatives currently underway in major financial institutions and further highlights some of the upcoming developments. Thomas will further explain how, as a result of the SOA Manifesto declaration from 2009, there is a concentrated effort among financial leaders to make a clear distinction between the service-oriented architectural model and the service-orientation design paradigm.

BIO

Thomas Erl is the world’s top-selling SOA author, series editor of the Prentice Hall Service-Oriented Computing Series from Thomas Erl (www.soabooks.com), and editor of the SOA Magazine (www.soamag.com). With over 125,000 copies in print world-wide, his books have become international bestsellers and have been formally endorsed by senior members of major software organizations, such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, Intel, SAP, CISCO, and HP.

Two of his seven books, SOA Design Patterns and SOA Principles of Service Design, were authored in collaboration with the IT community and have contributed to the definition of the service-oriented architectural model and service orientation as a distinct paradigm. Thomas is currently working with over 20 authors on six new books dedicated to service-oriented computing and modern service technology platforms, such as cloud computing.

In cooperation with SOASchool.com™, Thomas has helped develop the curriculum for the internationally recognized SOA Certified Professional accreditation program (www.soaschool.com), which has established a series of formal, vendor-neutral SOA certifications. Thomas is also the founder of SOA Systems Inc. (www.soasystems.com), an international company specializing in vendor-neutral SOA consulting and training services.

Thomas is the founding member of the SOA Manifesto Working Group (www.soa-manifesto.org), author of the Annotated SOA Manifesto (www.soa-manifesto.com), co-chair of the SOA Education Committee, and oversees the SOAPatterns.org initiative, a community site dedicated to the on-going development of a master pattern catalog for SOA.

Thomas has toured over 20 countries as a speaker and instructor for public and private events, and regularly participates in SOA Symposium (www.soasymposium.com) and Gartner conferences. Over 100 articles and interviews by Thomas have been published in numerous publications, including the Wall Street Journal and CIO Magazine.

For more information, visit www.thomaserl.com.

Most Web applications, besides the increasing support to functionalities and services will continue aiming at showing and delivering multimedia content. This basic feature that stems from the early Web 1.0 applications is currently empowered by the Web 2.0 and follow-on applications. Web 2.0 applications rely strongly on actual users editing, sharing, collaborating, and performing content tasks in real contexts of use. In this tutorial, we first present the particular characteristics of Web applications, particularly, the so-called Web 2.0 ones.

Second, we show how to specify quality requirements for functions, services and content for these applications, employing a minimalist and integrated approach. By reusing and extending the ISO 25010 quality models’ characteristics, we discuss the need of modelling and adding the content characteristic for evaluating the quality of information. Specifically, we argue that the internal and external quality models with the set of eigth characteristics, i.e. functional suitability, operability, reliability, security, performance efficiency, compatibility, transferability, maintainability, and their sub-characteristics respectively, are not sufficient to specify Web applications’ information quality requirements. As a consequence, we propose to include in both models the content characteristic and its sub-characteristics, i.e. content accuracy, content suitability, content accessibility, and content legal compliance.

Third, we give clues how these characteristics and attributes can be measured and evaluated regarding our measurement and evaluation approach and different methods. In order to illustate the main concepts, an example on the content dimension is developed.

Participation in this workshop is free for conference attendees. Registration required.

Duration: 2 hours

Date: October 15

About the Speaker

Luis Olsina is a Full Professor in the Engineering School at the National University of La Pampa, Argentina, and heads the Software and Web Engineering R&D group (GIDIS_Web). His research interests include Web engineering, particularly, Web quality assurance strategies, quantitative evaluation methods, Web metrics and indicators, organizational memories, and ontologies. He earned a PhD in the area of software engineering and a MSE from National University of La Plata, Argentina.

In the last 14 years, he has published over 80 refereed papers, and participated in numerous regional and international events both as program committee chair and member. Particularly, he co-chaired the Web Engineering Workshop held in USA in the framework of ICSE 2002 (Int’l Conference on Software Engineering); the ICWE 2002 congress (held in Argentina) and ICWE 2003 (held in Spain); in addition to LA-Web 2005 and 2008 editions and the WE track at WWW’06 (held in Edinburgh, UK). He has been an invited speaker at several conferences and professional meetings, and presented tutorials, for instance, at ICWE’05 (Int’l Conference on Web Engineering held in Australia), ICWE’09 (held in Spain), and graduate courses in different countries. Recently, Luis and his colleagues have co-edited the book titled Web Engineering: Modelling and Implementing Web Applications published by Springer, HCIS Series, 2008.

Sale is a key sphere of a business, which determines market success of your Company. Most probably your software products have a range of analogues and substitutes. And those companies which are better in sales than competitors became prosperous in the first place. That is why successful sales are crucial factor of business viability for hi-tech startups and innovative projects.

With the support of ABRT Venture Fund and Microsoft Russia experts of RIS Ventures company had worked out training course «Sales of software products and services: from the art to the process». That training is based on best world practices and successful sales experience.

That 4 hours base seminar is oriented to specialists which are interested in creating new products, entering the market and increasing, automating sales of existing products. This seminar will be useful for project managers, sales and marketing specialists, product managers.

During that training we’ll observe the next questions:

• What is the sales’ specific for new products and services?
• How to verify needs in product and demand on the market?
• How to build the sales process?
• What sales channels exist?
• What is more effective: direct sales or sales through partners?
• How to build effective sales through your partners?
• How to plan sales? How to obtain the accuracy of forecasts?

Training is conducted by RIS Ventures — the leader in the market of educational and consulting programs for hi-tech businesses, organizer of Start in Garage and Win the Market programs for startups founders, private investors and experts worked in hi-tech companies and investing funds.

More than 500 founders of hi-tech companies and representatives from investing business from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev (Ukraine) and San Francisco (USA) took part in RIS Ventures programs during 2007 – 2009 years.

All trainings are very intensive, include hands-on education, co-operative work with experts, personal coaching. More than 95% participants of RIS Ventures programs check significant rise in business effectiveness: for example, increase of company earnings more than 70% a year, attracting investments for business development and launching new products.

Training will be at 13th of October, 2010, in Moscow, in the network of CEE-SECR conference.

Cost of Course "Advanced Programming Techniques"

Cost
150 USD

Authors and instructors of the course

MoneyNews is Russia’s leading internet publication on electronic payments.

"FINANCE & CREDIT" is one of Russia’s leading publishers, specializing in the magazines in finance, economics, accounting, taxation - the need for these publications for many businesses become more and more urgent today.

Stas Fomin

Abstract

We will talk about corporate IT learning, when it’s required to transfer nontrivial and changeable knowledge among colleagues.

• The nontrivial knowledge is like programming languages and frameworks, abstractions and models, processes and regulations.
• The changeable knowledge means that there are no perfect books and courses, which you could buy and relax.
• Economical P2P-trainings, when colleagues train each other without any invited training specialists, is also required.

We would not discuss managerial issues (mentorship, motivation, etc), but only really working systems and tools, which we successfully use and develop.

Yes, there is a lot of e-learning systems, but they are rarely used in software development companies, because they are not usable and agile enough.

By the way the word "Agile" in the title of the talk is not directly connected with buzz-words from Agile-manifesto, only capacious word "Agile" is used, which means mobile, light-handed, quick, nimble, quick-witted. These terms exactly refer to those simple, economical and efficient tools which we want to tell you about.

• How to make preparation of multimedia materials for reading and even for seminars and presentations simpler and faster?
• How to make it collectively?
• How “to conserve” seminars and trainings for absent students?
• What is the easy way to make interactive simulators and examination systems?
• How to help employees in “mining” knowledge during the Internet surfing?

We will talk about all these moments, but the benefit for participants will not only consist in experience sharing («talk is cheap, show me the code»©, as Linus Torvalds says), but also in your ability to use freely all of these tools, because we will publish it as open-source.

BIO

Stas Fomin is Information Technology Deputy Director in Customized InformSystems company. He joined the company in 1999 having accomplished dozens of successful projects in regard to informational systems development and implementation. Stas is exploring the promising systems, frameworks, and standards, implementing effective tools and methodology of software development in the company.

Also Stas Fomin teaches algorithms and complexity theory at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) and at the Institute for System Programming (ISP RAS). Stas is a co-author of the book "Efficient algorithms and computational complexity", the author of scientific and engineering articles.

Before joining Customized InformSystems Stas Fomin worked as a developer of informational systems for Server company. Stas Fomin graduated the Applied Mathematics faculty at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) with honors in 1999.

See also http://www.linkedin.com/in/stasfomin

S. Arkhipenkov, PMP^® PMI,

The independent expert,
e-mail: sergey@arkhipenkov.ru

Abstract

According to industry statistics the past ten years only one third of software projects is completed successfully within the constraints of the Project Triangle. But is it true that we apply the criteria of project success, which came to us from the world of material production?

Software Engineering is a new kind of human activity, which differs from the material production. Programmers produce collective thoughts and express them in a particular programming language. This is not a material product. Management experience accumulated in the production of things often is not effective or suitable in software development. The software project should be managed by another way.

The report will be discussed on the fundamental distinctions of software development, the problems and contradictions that arise in the software project management as a result of ignoring the specifics of the industry.

The report will explain the Theory-W by Barry W. Boehm, the Transpersonal Psychology by A. Maslow and the software project management approach based on principles. The author’s goal is to demonstrate that the properly managed project can be successfully executed by team of ordinary developers.

BIO

Sergey Arkhipenkov. The expert in software project management, PMP^® PMI.

In software development for over 30 years. Create simulations of complex space systems in the Mission Control Center. Managed business software development and SEPI projects for PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Luxoft, CBOSS. Served projects commissioned by the European Space Agency, "Daimler-Benz Aerospace", corporation "Boeing", Bank of Russia, OAO "Gazprom". Author of 5 books, about 100 articles, reports and training courses on information technology and software project management. He graduated from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University.

TECHLABS is the only content portal on hardware and IT subject matters in Byelorussian Internet. The resource specialization is quiet diverse and covers all the aspects of IT both in Belarus and abroad.

At present TECHLABS is, first of all, a unique test laboratory on all major hardware subject matters which are covered on the pages of the edition. On average 40 to 60 professional materials are published monthly.

At present our resource is visited by 6 000 visitors per day who look through over 50 000 pages per day. We are visited, respectively, by 200 000 visitors a month who look through up to 1 500 000 pages.

The aim of TECHLABS project is to give the possibility to get helpful and objective data on IT in the form of daily renewed news and reviews on computer hardware, software and IT.